There are good reasons
why the Wall Street Journal recently took wooden pallets to task
in a front-page article entitled As Old Pallets Pile Up, Critics
Hammer Them As a New Eco-Menace. In the piece, reporter Peter
Anderson wrote, "Wooden pallets, generally used to ship consumer goods,
are multiplying and burying parking lots, snarling traffic and filling
landfill." According to Anderson, experts believe there are six wooden
pallets lurking in the US for every person.

The blight doesn't
stop there. Despite continual efforts to repair or recycle wooden pallets,
a report by the National Center for Environmental Decision-Making Research
declared that 6.16 million tons of wood pallets entered municipal solid
waste landfills or construction and demolition landfill facilities in
1995.

Another report claims
wooden pallets now represent 4% of all solid waste in landfills. Many
landfills have stopped accepting pallets and others charge fees for recycling.

The damage isn't limited
to the effects of disposal. It starts at the beginning of the manufacturing
process. According to Wastebusters, Inc., about 4.7 billion feet of solid
hardwoods were consumed for the production of wooden pallets in 1992.
Experts now estimate that the current annual production level of 600 million
new wooden pallets requires the cutting of nearly one million acres of
hardwood trees - trees that take up to 40 years each to replace.